We're having a tamalada!

Oh, my freaking Lord. That's just it. I'm inviting everyone I know (within driving distance, anyway) over for a tamale making party very, very soon.

Jamie and Claudia are at church, Jordan and I are skipping out, and I just stumbled across a blog that I love--Homesick Texan--and she blogs how to make tamales. I've long wanted to learn and now that it's completely necessary, since I live about 1000 miles away from the Baldaras Tamale Factory, there's nothing else to be done. Anyway, it should be a blast! We'll drag out the Shiner Bock and margaritas on the rocks and roll! I've missed it for this Christmas season, when they're a must-have (in Texas, anyway), but that's ok. I'll take good tamales any time of the year.

Notes to Self

How much do I love writer/poet Kyran Pittman's blog, Notes to Self?

Good lord, like a lot, lot.

Her post, Cat's Cradle had me in tears, and it certainly wasn't the only one that did. (Why you gotta make me cry, Kyran Pittman?!?)

An excerpt:

Children turn time into a game with string. When I was eight years old, fall through spring took an eon, summer was an era, and childhood was an eternity. Now I realize that it all passed in a blink of my parents' eyes. The structure of our life together as a family —so elaborate, so permanent-seeming — collapsed between their hands when that time was done.

She's funny and eloquent and thought provoking. You should check her out.

Iliad and Odyssey review

Every once in a while I run across a "review" of Jamie's Iliad and Odyssey on the internet, and I just ran across this one from some guy's blog in 2005 and thought it was very nice:

Kevin turned me on to a site, which I'd like to introduce to the lot of you. This guy Jamie Rieger has a site that I might not have thought twice about, but there's something really amazing there. He decided to read Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Oddysey. Just for shits and giggles. When he discovered how daunting the task would be, he decided to take comedic notes as he read, and he indexed those notes for the Iliad here and the Oddysey here. I strongly encourage you to stop by and give him a read. You might want to empty your bladder first, though. Start with the backstory to the Iliad, which had me in tears.

Now. Here's the question. Who reads The Iliad for funsies? I seriously have to give this guy mad props for undertaking the Sisyphean task of not only reading it, but taking notes the whole time, then taking the time to catalog those notes for our pleasure. And then to make it all be funny?

News

I kind of like Google News

Up until now, CNN has been my go-to news source, just out of sheer laziness. But I'm getting completely sick of them. They have ridiculous headlines--"Only the Lord knows if the miners are alive!" (I don't enjoy the turn-of-the-last-century sensationalistic flavor of that, nor do I like the reference to the LORD in a supposedly secular news source) and just a lot of fluff crap besides. And almost every story has to have a quote by someone talking about The Lord. Guess what? That's not news! THE LORD IS NOT NEWS!

I have yet to read about the assault rifles in a CNN headline (maybe because the pre-adolescents there think guns are oooky), but I do know that someone smuggled a monkey on a plane in his ponytail and a girl killed her father in a filthy apartment and this is a TV headline (note the exclaimation point like it's E! Entertainment, not CNN):

Spice Girl Melanie Brown -- in a paternity battle with Eddie Murphy! She breaks her silence on what she wants from him... in her first TV interview. Tonight, 9 ET.


Squeeeeee!!!!!!! Said the 11-year-old girl who wrote that.

Jamie says he likes the CNN breaking news emails he gets, but other than that, he never goes there. He likes the NY Times, and he said, "the writing for the business/news/health section is very different from the writing in the science/technology section. The science writing is very obviously supposed to be less formal and more breezy and fun. That amuses me. It's like omg you guys, let's talk about quarks!!1!"


I don't like the NY times because I have it in my head (fairly or not) that they're not reputable. I also have it in my head that the Boston Globe is hopelessly left-slanting and all the Fox news peices are written by Rush Limbaugh and not when he's not high.